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“What do you want from me, Reuben?” Chip spits the words, his voice rough with pain. Way too many things in his body feel like they’re in the wrong place – bruises marring his ashen skin like watercolor, lacerations lacing his face and chest and back, bones cracked and splintered. He has a sneaking suspicion one of his ribs may have punctured a lung, but it’s not like he can really prove it.
He's terrified, obviously. He doesn’t think he’ll ever not feel this terror winding through his marrow whenever Price is involved. It’s ground into him from years of inscrutable moods and short tempers and lessons driven home with raised voices and heavy fists. Years of following after him like a stray dog – kicked aside yet loyal all the same, desperately begging for scraps of love – have ensured the feeling will never fade. It’s habit at this point. Instinct.
Ruefully, Chip thinks of a story he heard once about dogs and a bell.
On top of the fear, though, Chip is pissed. Really, genuinely pissed. Cause, like, fuck man! He survived the fucking horrors of the Black Sea and escaped with – well, not his life, but his crew at least and that’s gotta count for something – and he’s reduced to a mess by Reuben Price? After everything – corrupted waters and shambling abominations and unkillable pirates and that fucking spider captain ripping out his fucking heart – he’s brought down and chained and beaten by some scrawny wanna-be captain with a fucked up magic eye.
Reuben crouches in front of him and takes Chip’s face roughly in his hand. It hurts, and Chip has to bite back a yelp at the contact. Reuben has pressed his fingers into fresh bruises on his jaw, dug his thumb into an open, stinging slice across Chip’s cheek. Chip grits his teeth and forces himself to hold a snarl on his face. He refuses to let Reuben see more of his fear than he already knows is there. Besides, Chip’s felt worse, and if he keeps reminding himself of that then hopefully it will overwhelm just how awful he feels now.
“What I want, Chip, is for you to feel the pain you have caused. I want you to understand that betraying me – betraying us – has consequences, and you will pay for them, same as anyone else here. You’re not special, Chip. Maybe you were, once, before you turned your back on us and destroyed everything we built together – and I kept that in mind when we last talked! You were special, so I was willing to offer you a deal – a chance to make up for what you’d done painlessly.” His fingers tighten on Chip’s jaw to yank him harshly forward. Chip wheezes, the chains binding his wrists behind him rattling. The cuffs of the manacles bite into raw, bleeding flesh. This close, Chip can smell the stench of whatever he'd smoked last – something bitter, but with a hint of sweetness that suggested it was expensive. Chip wrinkles his nose against it.
Price sneers at him, rage fizzing and cracking behind his eyes, manic energy making his presence feel like touching a live wire. “That was a mistake, apparently. One I will not be making again. You will be paying your debts in blood, same as everyone else who thinks they can cross me and get away with it. You have a lot of debts to pay, Chip, and I am going to enjoy hearing your screams as you pay them.”
“So, what?” Chip wrestles his face out of Reuben’s hand. He’s sure he only succeeds because Reuben let go, not because he actually managed to slip away. Fresh blood wells on his cheek from the wound Reuben agitated. “You just torture me on and on forever? Sounds like it’ll get pretty boring after a while.”
Price giggles wildly, sitting back on his heels. The sound crawls under Chip's skin and makes him itch. “No, no, come on, Chip! You know me better than that! You’ve betrayed me twice now, and one of those was in response to my generosity! You know I don’t let disrespect like that slide.” Chip knows all too well. He’d stood by Reuben’s side as those particular punishments were dealt. He’d never had to deal them himself as Reuben’s right hand, thank fuck – but something deep inside him wails at the thought. A memory of a quiet day fishing rises, unbidden, to the front of his mind. In it, the ocean smells like smoke. “No, when I get sick of you, I’m simply going to kill you. The great Captain Chip of the Riptide Pirates, dead at my hands. What an honor.”
Reuben’s voice is smug and drips with mockery, and he wears a particularly satisfied expression. He looks like a cat that just caught a canary and has discovered the whole thing fits in his mouth at once. His black eye glitters maliciously, the purple one humming, and there is blood under his fingernails.
Chip snickers.
It’s not funny. None of this is funny. There is nothing about this that could possibly be funny, except-
Except Chip is hurting and exhausted and scared and angry and so, so sick of this shit. And really, at this point? In the face of everything Chip has been through, killing him is just a drop in the ocean. It’s nothing. It’s less than nothing. Reuben’s powerplay, his final ultimatum, means nothing. Killing him means nothing.
It shouldn’t be funny. It really, really shouldn’t be, and yet Chip laughs.
There’s no humor in it – just the wild uncontrollable cackling of a man pushed to his limit and then past it. Gods, how fucked up is it that the threat of killing him isn’t even in the top contenders of the worst things Chip’s had to deal with in the past month alone? The thought only makes him laugh harder. The force of it tears at his never-quite-healed throat and lets blood bubble up to pool beneath his tongue.
Reuben recoils, face tight in bewildered irritation. In all of their years together Chip has never dared to laugh in Reuben’s face – not since the first time he got that lesson beaten into him, at least. Chip would revel in this, in how off-guard he’s managed to throw Reuben, except he’s busy hacking and wheezing around the blood flooding his throat and useless lungs.
“What?” Reuben snaps, looking thoroughly lost and more than pissed about it. “What are you laughing at? What could possibly be funny about this?”
Gods, Reuben’s gonna hate this. He hates coming in second, hates settling for anything less than absolute power. Something in Chip burns at the thought of finally, finally having something over him. He hacks and chokes to clear his throat and pull himself together enough to answer. He grins at Reuben, all bloody teeth, and spits a wad of the stuff at Reuben’s boots. It falls short, splattering in a red-black glob inches away from his toes. The rest dribbles down Chip’s chin. He couldn’t care less. He’s still laughing.
“I hate to burst your bubble, Reuben,” he wheezes, blood bubbling up as he continues to laugh, “but, uh – someone already beat you to it!”
Reuben is snarling again, eyes flickering wildly over Chip, the uncontrollable laughter twisting his face, the blood pouring down his chin, the depression in his chest where his ribs are misshapen. He seems to realize, finally, that his chest only hitches with the force of his laughter. It does not rise and fall to take in air – hasn’t in too long. Reuben looks back at the blood pouring from his mouth, thick and sticky and never-ending. Something creeps into the edges of his expression – something that is not quite fear, but skims the edge of horror. “The fuck are you talking about?” Reuben demands.
“I’m dead!” Chip cries, manic, gleeful. He’s never been happy about that fact – how could he be? – but in the face of Reuben’s shock and desperate rage, he’s overjoyed. “You really haven’t noticed? I fucking died, man! Had my heart ripped out and eaten and I can’t get that shit back. I’m dead, Reuben, and you didn’t kill me! Someone beat you to it! What a fucking honor, huh?”
“You’re lying.” Reuben’s voice is low, dangerous. Wavering. Chip chokes on laughter.
“If you don’t believe me, go ahead! Look for a pulse, man. You won’t find one!” The laughter is bitter. It doesn’t taste like the victories he’s gotten used to by Gill and Jay’s side. Still, it tastes close enough – something similar but a little to the left – and Chip drinks it up anyway.
With a wordless snarl, Reuben scrabbles to lean past Chip and snatch up his wrists. He jams his fingers against the veins where they’ve been rubbed raw by the chafing manacles. Chip cackles, bent nearly double over Reuben’s shoulder. Blood drips from his chin onto the stupid feathers on the collar of Price’s coat, rolling down to the expensive leather beneath. Chip hopes it stains. He hopes it never comes out completely. He hopes he leaves a permanent mark on something Reuben loves for once, instead of it being the other way around.
Reuben moves his fingers elsewhere on Chip’s wrist, switches to the other one, tries again. He gets frustrated with the manacles blocking access and shoves Chip’s arms away in frustration, rattling the chains. Then he snatches his arms back and feels around just above Chip’s inner elbows, pushing the muscles and tendons uncomfortably until he finds the spot he’s looking for and settles there for a moment. One beat, two. Then he snarls, raspy and enraged. He pulls away and the wild-eyed frazzled look on his face only makes Chip laugh harder.
“Shut up.” He hisses, jabbing two fingers along the side of Chip’s throat just below his jaw. Chip tilts his head back defiantly, still cackling. Reuben finds nothing there either and his hand suddenly slams into Chip’s jaw, sending him sprawling onto his back. “Shut up!” He roars, launching himself to his feet.
“How’s it feel, Reuben?” Chip’s shoulders continue to shake with laughter. He wriggles onto his side so that he can look up and bask in the glory of Captain Price seething with rage and falling apart over some street rat he knew as a kid. “You’ve wanted to kill me since I fucked you over in Skullslice. I know you did. But someone else has already done it! Even if you kill me now, you will always be second place to the bitch who got there first.”
“I said shut up!” A steel-toed boot collides with his side, cracking ribs, and oh, there goes the other lung. Still, Chip howls with laughter even as he curls in on himself against the barrage of Reuben’s enraged blows. It’s more out of habit or instinct than it is out of any real need to protect his organs. They don’t work anymore, anyway.
He laughs and laughs and laughs as Reuben rains down his fury, blood bubbling up his throat to pool sticky and crimson on the concrete floor beneath his face.
When Reuben gets sick of him and storms out of the cell they’ve locked him in, slamming the door behind him and leaving Chip curled up in a broken, bloodied mess, he doesn’t stop laughing.
When he turns his face into the cold floor, smearing inky blood up his cheek and into his hair he doesn’t stop laughing.
When his chest hitches, catching on the ribs puncturing his lungs and pulling he doesn’t stop laughing.
When the silence settles heavy over him, aching with the absence of the two people he needs most, he doesn’t stop laughing. But between the rounds of howling laughter, he begins to weep, and the tears fail to thin the blood pooled around him.